Children’s Roles in Social Reproduction

Abstract

Care and domestic work have gained attention in the global policy discourse, particularly following feminist research and activism showing its burden for women. However, these debates and political demands have generally overlooked children's contribution to social reproduction within and beyond the household. Empirical evidence shows that many children assume care and domestic responsibilities from an early age, with an increasingly gendered pattern as they grow. While such work can provide a learning opportunity, the time, energy and emotional labour put into it can be detrimental to their wellbeing. In this article, we review the empirical evidence on children's care and domestic work in developing countries, and argue that understanding children's roles in these tasks can complement the existing social reproduction scholarship, uncovering the intra-household and intergenerational distribution of care and domestic responsibilities, its determinants and effects on child wellbeing. We conclude by noting key conceptual and evidence gaps, and suggesting future research directions.

Intersecting Vulnerabilities: The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Psycho-emotional Lives of Young People in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

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Depletion, intersectionality and the limits of social policy: child carers in Mexico City

“…Children and adolescents also engage in social reproductive work particularly, though far from exclusively in low and middle-income countries, with girls more likely to be providers of unpaid care within the family. Yet, while there is now considerable research on the impact of paid labour by children outside the home and its impact on their physical and mental health (Grugel andPoley 2012, Fontana andGrugel 2015) there is only limited scholarship on children's social reproductive work, especially outside the UK, Europe and North America (Camilletti et al 2018).…”

Shaping methodology to explore language use in discourse on child and youth rights

“…The latest research findings confirm the challenges to multilingual discourse on youth and minors' rights protection in the rhetoric of international institutions, despite the alleged centrality of the protection discourse agenda in official policies. This concerns issues of realistic utopia of human dignity concept in administrative-legal settings (Habermas, 2018a), linguistically expressed discrimination or underestimation of human rights regarding various target audiences, including gender identity and gender expression (Kirkup, 2018), minority communities (Enarsson, Lindgren, 2019;Malloy, 2019) and ageing population (Phelan, 2018) rights representation, the issues of childcare (Camilletti, Banati, Cook, 2018). The above situation explains why Academia puts on the research agenda the investigation of such concepts as a child and youth rights-conscious concepts and argues that it is timely to explore their operation within the following dimensions:  discourse practice (Barros, 2018;Gasper, 2005),  philosophy of language for human rights (Boersema, 2018)  the essence of reference and referring, "Use" and "Truth-Conditions" theories, implicative relations (Lycan, 2018).…”